10 Lies Video Games Could Never Recover From

Arguably the most important part of a video game’s sales is marketing. It doesn’t matter if you made the greatest game of all time if your mom's the only who buys a copy.

Electronic Arts spent 961 Million dollars on marketing in 2022, alone - and that was only 16% of the 5.8 Billion dollars the industry spent on marketing that same year.

Even successful Indie game publishers say that you should plan for 25-50% of your budget to be marketing. A game that takes $5,000 to make, might cost another $2,500 getting the word out. The general consensus of some companies is simple: For each dollar you spend on marketing you can expect to bring in one buyer.

Now, of course, there are plenty of hurdles in selling even a great game. Maybe you’ve gone gold in a busy release window? Maybe the market’s saturated by low-quality titles of the same genre or theme? Or, y’know, maybe you made just a bad game? All things that can crap on your sales.

Sadly, a common way to get around that last one is the age-old technique of straight-up lying. And while it may work more often than we, as consumers, would like - that's not always the case.

In 2005, Guerrilla Games revealed Killzone 2, a sequel to their 2004 FPS that had, admittedly, middling reviews. So much for it gunning for the title of ‘Halo Killer’.

They put forth a very nice looking trailer showing, what they claimed, was actual gameplay. Though some believed that the PlayStation 3 was not mechanically capable of graphics of that quality in-engine.

While many cried foul that the video had been pre-rendered footage, the company continually claimed it was legitimate and not pre-rendered. After the truth came out that it was, in fact, a giant cutscene, Guerrilla Games switched from lying to gaslighting. They claimed the video was a “target render” for what they hoped the game would look like.

But the damage was done and consumers didn’t trust what was going to be released. When Killzone 2 came out in 2009 too many people remembered the lies. Sony expected to sell 2 million copies in North America, alone, but by their cut-off the game only sold half that... worldwide.

An added insult was that Sony had hoped Killzone 2 would convince people to go out and buy their console just to play it. But PS3 sales actually went down after Killzone 2 was released.